Info-democratic disorders and modes of citizenship: a cross-cultural audience study in Belgium and Luxembourg

Wiard, Victor;Patriarche, Geoffroy
(2023) Disrupted or disruptive audiences? From reception to participation in a post-truth era, ECREA Audience and Reception Studies Sec — Location: Porto (12.September.2023)

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Abstract
In recent years, a growing body of research taking an “audience perspective” on dis-/misinformation has tried to move away from detecting “fake news” on social media and assessing levels of exposure or deception, to focus on the reception of dis-/misinformation (Wagner & Boczkowksi, 2019). Following this perspective, this paper applies the concept of “folk theory” – understood as a set of beliefs, suppositions, simplifications, or guesses through which lay people generalise a certain view of the world (Nielsen, 2016) – to analyse how audiences make sense of the interplay between information disorders and democratic disorders. To tackle this issue, this research draws from the analysis of 30 semi-directive interviews with social media users who engage actively, and in various ways, with dis-/misinformation on social media. The sample spans across three communities – i.e. French-speaking and Dutch-speaking Belgium, as well as Luxembourg – and across the political and ideological spectrum. The analysis of the interviews allows us to identify a wide range of folk theories and sub-theories about info-democratic disorders. Building on this, the paper also provides insights into the (more or less contested) norms and models of democracy (e.g. Kligler-Vilenchik, 2017) that audiences draw upon in their theories. It offers an in-depth analysis of the views of democracy implied by these folk theories, including threats to democracy and preferred modes of citizenship. Moreover, although this study does not aim to quantitatively assess the prevalence of these folk theories across the studied communities, it does shed light on how culturally situated political beliefs, histories, and/or imaginaries inform audiences’ theorisations of info-democratic disorders in a particular linguistic, regional and/or national context. These findings not only question what audiences consider as dis-/misinformation, but also how they feel disrupted (or not) in their role as citizens in a democratic society. References : -Kligler-Vilenchik, N. (2017). Alternative citizenship models: Contextualizing new media and the new “good citizen”. New Media & Society, 19(11), 1887‑1903. -Nielsen, R., (2016). Folk Theories of Journalism, Journalism Studies, 17:7, 840-848. -Wagner, M. C., & Boczkowski, P. J. (2019). The Reception of Fake News: The Interpretations and Practices That Shape the Consumption of Perceived Misinformation. Digital Journalism, 7(7), 870-885.
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Wiard, V., & Patriarche, G. (2023). Info-democratic disorders and modes of citizenship: a cross-cultural audience study in Belgium and Luxembourg. Disrupted or disruptive audiences? From reception to participation in a post-truth era, ECREA Audience and Reception Studies Sec, Porto.